Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when he founded Facebook, and once famously said, “Young people are just smarter.”

Maybe Zuckerberg was right. Sure, experience is valuable, but I’m willing to accept the idea that experience can also be an impediment. Forbes and Newsweek were filled with old—timers who scoffed at the Internet, didn’t understand it, and didn’t want to understand it. They pined for the good old days. I couldn’t stand them. I was on the side of change. Those people had lots of experience, but their experience kept them from being able to adapt.

The Brook's law states that when a person is added to a project team, and the project is already late, the project time is longer, rather than shorter. Brooks’ law is recognized as applicable to any complex endeavor involving lots of people interacting together, not just software engineering.

I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all.

They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough.

I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t ...